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Somewhere along the line, I fear, the Democrats have forgotten what campaigning is all about and the release of these health care plans illustrates the problem PERFECTLY.
Democrats are generally considered to be to the left. Republicans to the right.
The "left" position on health care is that health care is a basic human right and everyone deserves to be treated equally when it comes to basic human rights. This country was founded upon the concepts of "Life, Liberty, The Pursuit of Happiness" When you look at all our founding documents as a whole, they are based on the concept that no individual has a superior right over another to life, liberty of the pursuit of happiness" Life = health, liberty = civil rights, pursuit of happiness = freedom, to dumb it way down. So I think one could easily argue that that health care is guaranteed to the people of this country in our founding documents.
The "right" position on health care is that health care is a privilege. The concepts of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness mean different things. Life = No one has the right to kill you, Liberty = The government doesn't have the right to take your money for the benefit of others and Pursuit of happiness = You have the absolute right to get as much stuff as possible.
Following these basic concepts, it makes sense that the Left would argue for single payer universal not for profit health care and the right would argue for health care goes to the people who can afford it. Makes sense in a twisted way, right?
NOTE: I am going to generalize positions here to illustrate a point.
In politics, compromises are often reached based on the amount someone believes in a issue. When one side cares about an issue more than another, the compromise will tilt toward that side. (The right cares about gun ownership much more than the left cares about ridding the world of guns, so we have limited gun control) (The left cares about protecting the elderly more than the right cares about keeping that additional amount in their paycheck, therefore we have social security), etc.
The idea in campaigning is to present your CORE BELIEFS to your party and express that this is what I am going to fight for. It is understood in politics that compromises are often reached in the name of progress. It is expected that each side will move off their position, holding onto the things they care about most and giving on the things that don't matter to them.
Now comes the problem.
The democrats (with the exception of Kucinich) are all STARTING from the compromise position. Rather than arguing from a position of equal health care as a basic human right, they accept that people with more money will receive superior care. They have set up positions that pander to a system that is already broken. They pander to companies who make profit from the suffering of others. When you start from this position, it's already over. You've lost the battle, because you gave up your strongest argument. Equal health care is no longer a basic human right... it is something for sale to the highest bidder.
So what is the result? The middle becomes the "left" and the right stays where it is. The "compromise" becomes a position somewhere between the middle and the right, instead of between the left and the right.
If we are negotiating a price for a widget and you are asking 100, but knowing you will accept 50 and my first offer is 50, you are now probably not going to accept less than 75, because you know my starting offer was less than I am willing to pay.
Unfortunately, this isn't limited to health care, but it is the greatest symptom of the problem.
We have the moral superiority on the Health Care issue. 47 Million people uninsured gives us the right to expose this broken health care system to the light of day. If we start from the compromise position AND wind up with some further compromise we have lost entirely. The 47 million (or enough of them) will be moved into a broken system and receive inferior health care. Decisions will be made by bureaucrats and not doctors and the issue will go away. Why? Because it will appear to be fixed, the same way unemployment is fixed. As long as we don't count people unemployed for more than a year and people who had to take jobs sweeping at McDonald's, the unemployment numbers look just dandy and no one pays attention. If the # of uninsured is suddenly 3 million with 50 million people receiving crappy health care, NO ONE WILL CARE the same way NO ONE CARES when we talk about the number of people UNDEREMPLOYED.
Either these candidates believe that equal health care is a basic human right or they do not. And the current positions suggest to me that they do not.
How the hell are we ever going to win, when we keep starting the debate from a compromise position?
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